The present device relates to a circular electronic musical instrument having a keyboard with keys which produces polyphonic musical notes. Specifically, the device is an organ which covers at least one octave of musical notes. The octaves are aligned in bands of concentric rings located on the top of the instrument. Each band of keys may contain one octave of notes. Notes in a first octave are next to or nearby identical notes in a second octave so as to make popular chords and songs easy to play. Notes may be played simultaneously which are octaves apart with one hand due to proximity of all the keys. A hand may extend over a centrally located loudspeaker and be used to vary the loudness and produce vibrato effects. A small overlay having information may be easily placed on the top of the keyboard to assist in learning songs by number, color, or other visual aids. A user may rotate the octaves individually by electronic means.
Electronic musical instruments which produce audible sounds using electronics are common. Such instruments typically make sounds by outputting an electrical audio signal that ultimately drives a loudspeaker. The loudspeaker (or “speaker”) is generally an electro-acoustic transducer that produces sound in response to the electrical audio signal input.
An electronic musical instrument may include a user interface for controlling its sound, often by adjusting the pitch which is an auditory sensation in which a listener assigns musical tones to relative positions on a musical scale based primarily on the frequency of vibration. The user interface may also adjust the frequency, which is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per second and the duration of each frequency occurrence or note. French composer and engineer Edgard Varèse created a variety of compositions using electronic horns, whistles, and tape. Most notably, he wrote Poène Électronique for the Phillips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958.
Electronic musical instruments are now widely used in most styles of music. Development of new electronic musical instruments, controllers, and synthesizers continues to be a highly active and interdisciplinary field of research. Specialized conferences, notably the “International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression”, have organized to report cutting edge work, as well as to provide a showcase for artists who perform or create music with new electronic music instruments, controllers, and synthesizers.
It is also known to provide electronic musical organs. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,291,603 to Katz discloses an electronic organ having a tone generating system for producing tones corresponding to notes of a musical scale. The tones and combinations thereof are selectable to provide different characteristics or “voices” which duplicate the various voices which are selectable on a pipe organ. The character of each such voice is determined by a single generator. The character of the output tone on a per manual basis is alterable by substituting or combining the outputs of different generators. The signal produced in this manner is sampled at a rate which translates it to an audio frequency. Early electric organ products released in 1930s/1940s were already implemented on frequency divider technology with vacuum tubes.
With the development of the transistor, a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power, electronic organs that used no mechanical parts to generate the waveforms became practical. The first of these was the frequency divider organ, the first of which used twelve oscillators to produce one octave of the chromatic scale, and frequency dividers to produce other notes. These were even cheaper and more portable than existing mechanical organs. Later developments made it possible to run an organ from a single frequency oscillator.
Frequency divider organs were built by many companies, and were offered in kit form to be built by hobbyists. A few of these have seen notable use, such as the Lowrey organ played by Eric Garth Hudson (b. Aug. 2, 1937) a Canadian multi-instrumentalist. As the organist, keyboardist and saxophonist for Canadian-American rock group “The Band”, he was a principal architect of the group's unique sound. Its electronic design made the Lowrey organ easily equipped with a pitch bend feature that is unavailable for other non electronic organs, and Hudson built a style around its use.
Today there are toys and teaching aids that produce musical notes and chords. Many of these are used to amuse a child or teach some musical principle. Electronic organs currently being sold mostly consist of a rectangular shape with keys mounted in a straight layout or semi-circle to produce the notes. The keys in the top octave of the device are typically at one end of the keyboard and the keys in the lowest octave are typically at the other end of the keyboard. Playing notes octaves apart requires using both hands and movement of the eyes to see both keys to be played. Overlays on the keys become long and cumbersome. On these instruments the playing of notes separated by octaves does not leave a hand free to play rhythm or percussion keys. Changing the instrument sound during chords also cannot be accomplished easily when both hands are required to play the notes. When these organs are used by a child with small hands the difficulty factor in producing harmonious chords and melody at the same time is multiplied.
Being circular in shape, a steel pan/drum arranges notes in a circular fashion. In U.S. Pat. No. 8,207,435 to Charles discloses arrangements of tuned areas that cover three and four octaves using concentric bands for the tuned areas. The patent states “a tablature system for representing a series of notes to be played on a steel pan/drum having a plurality of concentric rings of note pads, wherein each note pad is capable of producing a distinct musical pitch when struck.” A tool is required to strike these areas and produce the sounds when the steel pan/drum notes are desired. The notes played on a steel pan/drum do not have the advantages of electronic musical instruments such as enhanced musical effects like glissando, vibrato, timbrato, tremolo, echo, amplification, memory, and controlled fading to name a few.